Sainsbury's Complete Nutrition Adult Dry: With Chicken & Vegetables review

Our Poor band is where this one comes out, two bands under the Good band that holds the middle of the adult dry shelf. Very little of that is about anything the food does wrong. This recipe leans on four umbrella terms: cereals, meat and animal derivatives, oils and fats, and vegetables. Transparency still reads Good, but so little named meat behind those terms leaves protein and processing in our Poor band. Add a carbohydrate share above the shelf norm and a protein figure in the low twenties as a proportion of dry matter, and the reading follows. It is still a complete adult food, made to the same standard every complete food has to meet, and a dog thriving on it is doing perfectly well.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, Meat and Animal Derivatives (25.5% including 4% Chicken), Oils and Fats, Minerals, Vegetables (0.5% Dried Peas equivalent to 4% Peas).

Cereals lead, which tells you grain is the base but not which grain, and it leaves the maker free to move between wheat, maize, rice and barley as supply dictates. On the animal side sits meat and animal derivatives at 25.5%. That legal category covers the fleshy parts and processing by-products of warm blooded land animals. Whichever bag you pick up, 4% of the finished recipe is named as beef or chicken.

That naming matters more than it looks. Category terms take in everything from good material to poor, and a label written this way cannot tell you which end it draws from. For most dogs eating happily, that makes no practical difference at all. If you need one particular animal kept out of the bowl, the ingredients panel cannot help.

Dried peas at 0.5% are the vegetable entry, and before drying the pack reckons that at 4% peas. Whole peas are a decent thing to find in a kibble, bringing fibre and a spread of vitamins with them, though at half a percent of the finished food their contribution is a small one.

Oils and fats supplies the added fat without saying whether it came from an animal or a plant. On the beef the analysis reads 20.5% protein, or 22.3% of dry matter. The chicken reads 21.0%, or 22.8%. Fat sits at 9.2% of dry matter on both. Estimated carbohydrate lands at 56.0% of dry matter either way, which is the cereals doing the heavy lifting.

Oxides and sulphates are the forms the added minerals take. Those are the older forms, and generally the less readily absorbed. Selenium comes as sodium selenite, the mineral salt form. Vitamins A, D3 and E are all dosed in print, at 17000 IU, 1500 IU and 70mg per kilo, with zinc at 100mg and iron at 60mg alongside them.

Chicken is the named meat in this one, again at 4% of the recipe. The analysis shifts only slightly: protein at 21.0% as fed, or 22.8% of dry matter, with ash a shade lower at 8.7%. Energy reads 346 kcal per 100g, a difference from the beef that no dog will ever notice.

£0.95 a kilo on the beef and £1.00 a kilo on the chicken. The beef is listed in a 3kg bag and the chicken in 3kg and 12kg.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats about 244 grams of the beef a day, or 243 grams of the chicken. The 840 kcal a day behind that comes from the standard maintenance estimate, 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That works out at roughly £0.23 and £0.24 a day. The pack's own guide asks 180 to 410 grams for a dog of 10kg to 30kg, so let your dog's shape settle where between the two figures they belong.